TURKU MUSEUM OF HISTORY AND THE FUTURE

Client: City of Turku

Location: Turku, Finland

Date: 2024

Type: Culture

Length: 8730m2

Budget: EUR 41 million

AZPML

Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Maider Llaguno-Munitxa, Ivaylo Nachev

TURKU’S FUTURE VILLAGE

Our proposal for the Museum of History and the Future aims to produce an infrastructure capable to host a wide variety of activities on the site, always in a strong connection with the wider urban context within Turku. The complex has been conceived as an infrastructure to produce content which can be channelled through digital media or through collaborations with other institutions abroad, but a central aim of our project is to make content physically available to the citizens and the visitors. This is the reason why all facilities are accessible on the ground level, so the experience of the museum is a seamless continuum with the experience of Turku’s streets. We have deliberately avoided to make a second level, so access to the content is as immediate and urban as possible. The museum becomes a street experience, a village of activities for citizens and visitors alike.

A miniature of urban fabric: the market of ideas

The variety of functions required in the program, and the importance of a connection to the local street life in Turku has driven the primary structure of the project, which is designed as a “village”, a small piece of urban fabric which revolve around the provision of interior “streets” sometimes climatized and sometimes simply covered. The different programs can therefore be accessed always on the street level. Our model is a traditional urban market, where an interior public space provide access to multiple suppliers, in this case of cultural products rather than material goods.  The different with a traditional market is that the spatial structure of the Museum of History and the Future is highly differentiated. the products are a variety of spaces where different cultural activities can take place.

Everything under a single roof

All spaces in the complex are located on ground level to maximize public accessibility. They are covered under a single roof which provides differential qualities for each of them. The building has been conceived as a single roof that unifies a variety of spaces suitable for different activities.

The pitched roof is the archetype of Finnish vernacular architecture and we are using it as the language of this project: an accretion of pitched roofs which we can find in the archipelago villages in Turku’s surroundings. The pitched roofs will produce the distinctive image of the complex, but also will give a specific spatial quality to the Museum’s rooms.

In order to unify all the functional spaces, we propose to use a vernacular roofing technology which has already an important presence in Turku: the pitched, copper standing-seam roof.  We can find multiple examples of this roofing typology in Turku: the Turku Castle, the Turku Cathedral, the Art Museum, the Old City Hall and Library… just to name the most prominent examples.

The copper roof is an important reference for an architectural feature that connects the vernacular traditions with a future-proofed material, which will surely play an important role in the future building ecologies. Copper not only has a strong local tradition: it is a material with a very long life cycle, and low embodied energy. The silhouette of the accretion of copper pitch roofs will become both a strong reference to Turku’s vernacular architectural traditions, but also a projection of these traditions into a future architecture of sustainable and low-embodied energy. The pitched, standing-seam copper roof is the building element that will connect the vernacular architectural traditions with the future building technologies.

Ecological construction

One of our targets in this project is to produce a building which will achieve the highest standards for sustainability. Profiting from the fact that our design is conceived as a single floor building, we propose to use a timber structure and envelope to achieve the lowest possible level of embodied energy. Timber is a local material which acts as a carbon trap. Furthermore, prefabricated timber construction has the highest insulation and airtightness ratios.